QuickBooks is a widely used software to track and manage finances. Small businesses and individuals often use QuickBooks to send invoices, receive payments, manage inventory, handle payroll, and prepare taxes. If you already know how to use QuickBooks, you might consider learning more advanced accounting skills, pursuing a career in financial analysis or modeling, or even helping other businesses with tax preparation or payroll management. We’ll cover accounting, financial analysis and modeling, tax preparation, and payroll management below so you have a clear understanding of what skill you want to tackle next.
What is QuickBooks?
QuickBooks is a widely used accounting and bookkeeping software package from Intuit. Primarily used by small and medium businesses, QuickBooks helps businesses to track and manage everything to do with their finances. Using QuickBooks, businesses can monitor their cash flow and profits and losses by tracking sales, expenses, customers, and payments. QuickBooks is also often used to create and send invoices, manage the business’s inventory, and manage employee payroll. It also has budgeting, time tracking, and daily task features to keep businesses running efficiently.
QuickBooks helps businesses ensure the accuracy of their records by directly connecting sales channels to QuickBooks and reconciling bank transactions with the information one inputs. The software also has features to help with tax preparation and can be used as a way to collaborate and share documents with an accountant. QuickBooks is a subscription-based service with varied payment tiers that provide access to different features. The different versions of QuickBooks cater to different storage and employment needs as Intuit offers basic to premium plans of its cloud-based QuickBooks Online, a computer-installed QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise version for larger companies, and a version for freelancers and independent contractors called QuickBooks Solopreneur.
Read more about what QuickBooks is and why you should learn it.
What Can You Do with QuickBooks?
QuickBooks software has many different applications and uses across a wide variety of industries. Many small and medium-sized businesses use QuickBooks for its record-keeping features as it was originally designed for businesses without a dedicated accounting department. QuickBooks allows someone to track and categorize many things such as expenses, sales, transactions, and customer, vendor, and inventory lists. This makes QuickBooks a great option for those needing to keep all of their business records in one place.
Additionally, many people use QuickBooks to create and send invoices, manage employee payroll, help prepare their taxes, maintain a budget, and automate tasks. QuickBooks includes features to automate accounts payable and receivable. Many use QuickBooks to automate sending customer invoices or payment reminders or even keeping employees updated on crucial tasks and sending deadline reminders. These features of QuickBooks allow you to increase productivity and maintain efficient workflows so that you do not constantly need to task employees with work that can be done by the QuickBooks software itself.
Not only do businesses use QuickBooks, but QuickBooks is often used by self-employed people like freelancers and independent contractors. QuickBooks offers a specific version of the software called QuickBooks Solopreneur (formerly QuickBooks Self-Employed or SE). Many people find that once they link their accounts, it is easy to import their transactions and the QuickBooks software will automatically work to tag one’s income. Self-employed users will likely need to do a bit of extra work to categorize their transactions more effectively for their own needs, but QuickBooks can do much of the bookkeeping work automatically and make tracking finances easier for individuals.
Accounting
Learning QuickBooks can be the first step in becoming an Accountant. After learning QuickBooks, it is a natural next step to go on to learn more about accounting or take other accounting-specific classes to continue down this career path. This free comprehensive guide to learning accounting from Noble Desktop details what the field of accounting is and how to follow this career path. To start, consider taking a beginning-level accounting course to learn the basics of accounting principles and how to read and understand financial statements and reports. Learning more about accounting will help you to leverage your QuickBooks skills into a sustainable career.
Financial Analysis
QuickBooks users gain experience in organizing and understanding complex financial data that can help someone transition into a career in financial analysis or financial modeling. Financial analysis involves helping businesses make decisions by evaluating their performance, profitability, and sustainability. To do this kind of analysis, one needs to learn how to analyze financial statements, study current market developments, assess investments, create models, and make recommendations to increase a business’s performance. One will learn financial modeling as a part of financial analysis, though it can be a standalone skill and career.
Noble Desktop offers a Financial Analyst Training Program that will get you started down this career path. This 30-hour class teaches students fundamental corporate finance and accounting principles, how to use Excel for financial projection, and how to build real-world financial models. Students will receive hands-on, interactive training in financial analysis and do not need to take any other classes in accounting, Excel, financial analysis or modeling before taking this program. However, for those who prefer to take individual classes, there are a variety of in-person and live online finance classes one can enroll in as well.
Tax Preparation or Payroll Management
Once someone has a handle on QuickBooks, it can also be useful to continue to strengthen one’s skills and knowledge of important processes like tax preparation or payroll management. Both of these are not only popular features within the QuickBooks software but also viable career specializations that one can pursue after learning QuickBooks. Those interested in tax preparation can eventually move into roles advising and helping individuals and businesses with their taxes and those interested in payroll management can not only learn further payroll strategies but can leverage their knowledge into a career in human resources.
Many will want to continue to develop their tax preparation skills after learning QuickBooks, either for their own uses or to aid other businesses. Increasing one’s knowledge of how to compile and file taxes can also be turned into a career as a Tax Preparer, where one’s central role will be helping others complete and submit their taxes. For this kind of career, one will need to learn more about tax law and tax compliance and, perhaps, even need to learn to use additional software or applications specific to tax preparation. This kind of route is best for someone with a strong background in math, as Tax Preparers will need to make detailed calculations when preparing taxes.
Those interested in payroll management need to similarly learn more about compliance and legal systems, but more from a labor standpoint so that they can help businesses and employees with deductions and benefits. Learning how to streamline payroll processes and automate tasks are the next steps for those who want to develop stronger payroll management strategies. Additionally, someone with payroll experience can segue into HR management roles by learning more about recruiting, hiring, onboarding, employee outreach and retention, and employee-specific record-keeping. HR roles are perfect for those with strong communication skills who want to act as the bridge between employees and those in other management or administrative positions.
Learn QuickBooks with Hands-on Training at Noble Desktop
Noble Desktop offers expert in-person and live online training for those interested in learning QuickBooks. Noble Desktop’s classes all include expert, hands-on guidance, small class sizes, and free retake options and many classes offer both part-time and full-time options so that one can find the QuickBooks or finance class that works best for their schedule. For fast and comprehensive training in QuickBooks, consider enrolling in Noble Deskop’s QuickBooks Bootcamp which teaches students everything they need to know about how to use QuickBooks to track and manage a business’s finances. This bootcamp uses hands-on training to teach students the basics of QuickBooks like configuring a company profile, working with customer, vendor, and inventory lists, and invoicing and processing payments as well as the more advanced management and customization features. Noble Desktop offers this bootcamp live online from any location and it can be taken in person at Noble Desktop’s training facility in New York City.
Noble Desktop also has accounting classes and bootcamps which are a great option for anyone interested in developing their skills or learning more about finance and accounting. The Intro to Financial Accounting & Financial Statements class uses hands-on exercises to teach students the fundamentals of analyzing financial statements and reports. After completing this introductory class, students can progress to the Intermediate Financial Accounting class which teaches more complex topics like earnings per share and deferred taxes. For those who want a comprehensive, accelerated class that tackles both beginner and intermediate topics of accounting, consider the Financial Accounting Bootcamp which teaches everything students need to know in two class sessions.
Noble’s finance and accounting classes are great for those who want to grow their financial literacy beyond learning about QuickBooks. These classes are also useful for those interested in turning their knowledge of QuickBooks into the first step to becoming a Bookkeeper or Accountant. If this is something that interests you, you can learn more about the career path of an Accountant by reading Noble Desktop’s comprehensive guide to accounting, a free resource that covers essential information about accounting and how to learn the skills necessary to make this one’s career. For those who want to work in finance in some capacity but are not entirely sure which direction they want to go in yet, Noble Desktop’s guide to finance is a useful way to read about different career options.